1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the technical field of an information recording medium having a reproduction control program recorded thereon and reproduction control program. More specifically, the present invention relates to the technical field of an information recording medium, which has recorded thereon a reproduction control program for reproducing reproduction information including movies distributed via networks such as the Internet, and reproduction control program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, DVDs (Digital Versatile Disc) have been widely used which are several times larger in recording capacity than conventional CDs (Compact Disc). It is understood that the DVD can record, for example, moving images and sound of a single movie.
In general, the movies or the like recorded in the DVDs are copyrighted products and the products are usually protected by copyrights. In this case, the copyrights are specifically protected by, for example, limiting the number of copies of a movie to another recording medium from a DVD having recorded the movie or limiting regions permitting the reproduction of the DVD.
To be specific, in order to limit regions permitting the reproduction of the DVD, the DVD is caused to record region information indicating regions where the DVD is distributed (hereinafter, the region information recorded on the DVD will be referred to as disc region information), and a DVD player for playing the movie or the like from the distributed DVD also stores region information indicating regions where the DVD player is permitted to operate (hereinafter, the region information stored in the DVD player will be simply referred to as player region information). Only when a region indicated by the disc region information and a region indicated by the player region information are coincident with each other, the movie or the like can be reproduced by the DVD player.
On the other hand, research and development have been recently conducted in earnest to distribute movies or the like themselves in an electronic state via networks such as the Internet.
However, when movies or the like are distributed via the networks, particularly in the case of the Internet, it is technically difficult for a server serving as a distributor to specify the location of a computer serving as a terminal at a distribution destination. Therefore in this case, it is impossible to limit the distribution destination of the movies or the like to specific regions and thus it is not possible to effectively protect copyrights by limiting regions permitting reproduction, that is, it is not possible to effectively perform reproduction control for each region.